TY - JOUR
AU - Chan,, Paula
AB - Abstract This study considers the extent to which Stalinist political goals influenced the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s information gathering about Nazi crimes on the local level. Examining the investigation of Klooga concentration camp in Estonia, the author compares the statements that Jewish survivors gave to commission investigators with these same survivors’ testimony preserved in other Soviet and non-Soviet sources. She argues that investigations took fundamentally different courses in different places due to local agendas and conditions. In cases such as Klooga, Jewish survivors and Soviet investigators worked together to document Nazi atrocities, creating the accurate record that Stalin’s government required to pursue its political objectives. A small fraction of Jewish prisoners survived the massacre at Klooga concentration camp by hiding in an attic or pretending to be dead. A labor camp located just outside of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, in its final months Klooga housed more than 2,000 inmates, mainly employed for the production of concrete blocks and underwater mines.1 By the time the camp was liquidated in September 1944, the 108 Lithuanian Jews still alive there had learned caution from three years of Nazi oppression:2 even after the Germans left Klooga, these inmates stayed where they were out of fear of the remaining Estonian guards. The prisoners crept out of their hiding places only when the Red Army entered the camp grounds.3 The Red Army, in turn, left the crime scene exactly as it was until the Extraordinary State Commission arrived.4 The investigation that followed was the shared product of Soviet actors and Jewish survivors, a momentary overlap of red stars and yellow stars. Soviet investigators needed to know what only the prisoners could tell them, and these prisoners needed the Soviet government to preserve and broadcast this information. The present article utilizes this moment of cooperation between survivors and investigators to broaden our understanding of Extraordinary State Commission documentation, fundamentally important for study of the Shoah in the East. Formed midway through the Battle of Stalingrad in November 1942, the Extraordinary State Commission undertook to gather evidence for the prosecution of war crimes and restitution for economic destruction during the Nazi occupation of Soviet territories. In cases of crimes with few or no survivors, the Commission’s findings often served as the sole documentation of mass killings, yet subsequently these materials remained inaccessible for decades, even to Soviet researchers.5 Since the collapse of the USSR, Commission documents have become increasingly available, but the question of how Soviet political goals influenced the veracity of these materials continues to haunt the scholarship. Here I follow a group of Jews from the Vilna ghetto (Lith. Vilnius) to Klooga concentration camp, comparing their testimonies before the Extraordinary State Commission with their statements in other Soviet and non-Soviet records. Beyond “fact-checking,” the purpose of this comparison is to demonstrate that in this and similar cases, capturing accurate information on Nazi atrocities was a prerequisite for Stalin’s government to pursue its political ambitions more effectively. By seeking out these local records, and bypassing the central Soviet authorities’ propagandistic use of the material passed up to them, historians can reconstruct narratives that might otherwise be lost. The decimation of the Vilna ghetto population occurred in two stages that reflect the evolution of Nazi practices in the Baltic region.6 Through an examination of Soviet efforts to document these massacres, this article will illustrate how specific circumstances of crime scenes shaped the course of investigations. The extant records of the Extraordinary State Commission are formidable: more than 43,000 files of often hastily handwritten material. As a coping mechanism, scholars have tended to extrapolate on the basis of case studies. In 1995, John Garrard and Marian R. Sanders were among the first Western researchers to work with Commission documents after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began providing access to duplicates. By focusing on separate investigations in Ukraine, these two authors reached opposite conclusions on the subject of local perpetrators, with Garrard asserting that the Commission covered up collaboration, and Sanders arguing that exaggerated charges of aiding the enemy were a tool for political repression.7 Yet deciphering a single investigation does not provide the key to interpreting the Commission’s records as a whole. Rather, Extraordinary State Commission investigations pursued different objectives with different resources in different places at different points in time. Prior to the availability of Extraordinary State Commission documents and other Soviet archival materials, many aspects of the Holocaust in the East could be researched from only a German perspective.8 In addition to offering new answers, however, Commission records confront historians with new questions and problems. Thus far, scholars have demonstrated a proclivity to infer intervention from the central Soviet government to explain peculiarities in the Commission’s documents. Both Garrard and Sanders connect their contradictory findings to what they claim are coherent goals dictated and enforced by Stalin’s regime. For example, Garrard asserts that central authorities told local commission members to minimize reportage of collaboration and to conceal the Jewish identity of victims, instructions that “percolated down from Moscow” early in 1944.9 Other authors have made similar assumptions about the replacement of references to the Jewish population with references to “peaceful Soviet citizens,” generalizing this type of redaction as the “Kiev method” or the “technology of substitution.”10 A broader review of Extraordinary State Commission materials demonstrates that nothing as systematic as a “method” or a “technology” shaped the commissions’ work. At Klooga, representatives of the Red Army cooperated with local residents and former prisoners to compose a report that clearly identified “a camp for Jews taken from the Lithuanian SSR [Soviet Socialist Republic, per Lithuania’s absorption into the USSR in 1940] by the Germans.”11 Similarly, the official report on the Ponary massacres (mass killings by the Nazis and their collaborators over three years outside Vilna) explicitly stated: “Judging by documents found in the clothing, the majority of the murdered belonged to the Jewish nationality.”12 Even after the Soviets’ final victory, when a separate commission devoted to the city of Vilna as a whole completed its investigation in June 1945, the authors noted that the Ponary mass killings targeted the Jewish population.13 Open in new tabDownload slide Sign in German, Russian, and Estonian warns that guards will shoot without warning. Entrance to Klooga concentration camp, ca. 1944. Note barracks behind. Courtesy Ghetto Fighters' House Museum. Open in new tabDownload slide Sign in German, Russian, and Estonian warns that guards will shoot without warning. Entrance to Klooga concentration camp, ca. 1944. Note barracks behind. Courtesy Ghetto Fighters' House Museum. Open in new tabDownload slide Main gate of Klooga concentration camp, ca. 1944–1945, courtesy Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. Open in new tabDownload slide Main gate of Klooga concentration camp, ca. 1944–1945, courtesy Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. Published Commission reports on the Baltic republics also belie generalizations about covering up collaboration and Jewish victimhood. The official report on the Estonian SSR that appeared in Izvestiia in November 1944 denounces Hjalmar Mäe, former chief director of the Estonian “self-government” under Nazi occupation, as a “traitor to the Motherland.”14 The official report on the Latvian SSR that Pravda featured four months later was the last Commission report published on Nazi atrocities in the USSR during the war. This one features local residents participating in mass shootings and digging the graves in exchange for victims’ possessions. In addition, the report on Latvia includes a section entitled “Bloody Massacre of the Jewish Population of the Latvian SSR by Germans.”15 Even in published reports, it was not always necessary to fully suppress the themes of collaboration or the targeting of Jews, because the need to liberate the majority of Baltic citizens from their own reactionary, exploiting classes had been what justified Soviet annexation of these territories only a few years before.16 The distinctiveness of Soviet political goals in the Baltic republics offers an ideal premise for an examination of the Extraordinary State Commission’s work. During the war, the Soviet Information Bureau (est. June 24, 1941) was to publicize the collaborationism of Baltic nationalists with the goal of achieving international (particularly U.S.) recognition of Soviet claims to sovereignty over Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.17 Liberating the region from Nazi occupation in 1944 first reinforced and then superseded the earlier narrative of having delivered the Baltic republics from oppressive native regimes. Local investigators added survivors and casualties alike to lists of “Soviet citizens,” and Baltic economic losses became “Soviet” losses through absorption into the USSR’s aggregate demands for German reparations. Jewish survivors facilitated these processes with their participation in the Soviet quest for payback. Timothy Snyder has argued that the Soviet liquidation of the Baltic states in 1940–1941 created a “political resource” for the Nazi regime.18 Similarly, by targeting the Jewish population with the aid of local collaborators, Hitler ensured that the Jews who lived would cleave to Soviet power without dwelling on whether it was “legitimate.” As the Red Army moved west, Stalin’s government and Jewish survivors pursued the same immediate objectives: to document and to punish. Extraordinary State Commission records reflect this temporary overlapping of interests. The Klooga concentration camp offers the additional advantage of being unusually well-documented. When the Soviet military arrived at Klooga on September 24, 1944, pyres piled with corpses were still smoking. The Red Army photographed the mass murder site and reported on it widely.19 Klooga was also the first Jewish camp Western observers saw for themselves. The British navy attaché in Moscow, along with a delegation of Western writers and journalists, was visiting newly liberated Tallinn when several of the journalists—most famously John Hersey—toured the concentration camp and published their impressions. As Anton Weiss-Wendt has argued, Nazi atrocities at Klooga and the consequent need for revenge fit the image that the USSR wanted to present to an international audience.20 Yet certainly practical considerations also played a vital role. The SS officers at Klooga had intended to destroy the evidence, but insufficient kerosene meant that the pyres had burned only in the center.21 Furthermore, German haste in evacuating Estonia permitted the survival of 108 prisoners who could inform the Extraordinary State Commission investigation in a way that simply was not possible with most other large-scale killings that took place “on Soviet soil.”22 Open in new tabDownload slide The Extraordinary State Commission views bodies of Klooga prisoners stacked for burning, fall 1944. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Open in new tabDownload slide The Extraordinary State Commission views bodies of Klooga prisoners stacked for burning, fall 1944. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The persistent efforts of Holocaust survivors to communicate their experiences enable this article to reconsider the Extraordinary State Commission’s operations on the local level. Nisan Moiseevich Anolik and Abram Moiseevich Vapnik, two natives of Vilna and eyewitnesses for the investigation of Klooga, also contributed testimonies to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s Black Book project. Benjamin Iakovlevich Weintraub, another Vilna native and Klooga witness, had his story recorded both by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and by John Hersey.23 Mendel Samuilovich Balberyszski, from Vilna as well, testified to the Klooga commission and later composed a memoir substantiated with research for the so-named Vilna Ghetto Archive;24 the founder of this archive, Herman Kruk, also deserves a place in the present study, even though he did not live long enough to encounter the Commission. Kruk concealed his diary in a cellar before he was sent to Klooga, and on the day before he was shot (in the Lagedi subcamp) he buried his last papers in front of six witnesses. Of the latter, only Anolik lived to exhume them.25 Kruk’s observations and other survivors’ statements shed light on one another, preserving a record of thousands of similar victims at Klooga and tens of thousands at Ponary. As the following will show, Extraordinary State Commission investigators and Soviet officials in Moscow pursued the same objective for different reasons. The Jerusalem of Estonia These men from Vilna defied incredible odds to live long enough to make it to Klooga, let alone to survive the camp’s liquidation (excepting Kruk). Herman Kruk and Mendel Balberyszski were living in Poland when Joachim von Ribbentrop and Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov signed the nonaggression pact that secretly defined German and Soviet “spheres of interest” in Eastern Europe, with Eastern Poland and the Baltic countries falling into the Soviet domain.26 Kruk left Warsaw for Vilna on September 5, 1939, four days after Hitler’s army invaded Poland from the west and less than two weeks before the Soviet military did the same from the east.27 Balberyszski set out alone on foot for his native Vilna, where he reunited with his wife and children two months later.28 Some 20,000 refugees fled Poland for independent Lithuania around this time, only to find themselves soon under a different kind of occupation.29 Stalin’s government concluded “Mutual Assistance Pacts” with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in autumn 1939. Disappointed with the Baltic countries’ compliance, the Soviet Union demanded a change in all three governments the following summer. The new, Soviet-approved parliaments voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining the USSR, and thus Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania became Soviet socialist republics in August 1940, less than eleven months before the Nazi invasion. Stalin’s government justified its actions in part on the basis of protecting the Baltic peoples from the German threat. According to a pamphlet published in 1941, “only politically blind people or the hopelessly stupid” could fail to realize that the USSR had spared Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the fate of Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, and other countries enslaved by Hitler.30 The standard tenth-grade textbook published in 1941 featured a photograph of workers marching in Tallinn in support of joining the USSR. They are carrying a sign which reads (in Estonian): “Long live our great leader Stalin.”31 Propaganda aside, living under Soviet rule meant different things for different people, and if Stalin’s government did not single out newly Soviet Jews for persecution, it also did not spare them. Balberyszski writes that shortly before the Nazi invasion, NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) agents arrived at his home in the middle of the night and gave his sister, brother-in-law, and their daughter an “hour or so” to pack before herding them into trucks and deporting them into the Soviet interior. Balberyszski reports that some 5,000 Jews accused of being “anti-Soviet” shared this fate on June 14–15, 1941, and were thus spared the horrors of the Nazi occupation thanks to “Communist cruelty.”32 Kruk, too, described “the Bolshevik roundup” as having been so depressing “that even the former Reds were ashamed of it.” Looking back in late August, however, Kruk observed that “those ‘lucky ones’ who were exiled are envied. Thus, one misfortune is traded for another.”33 Hitler’s military invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. The Red Army evacuated Vilna the day after, and by the third day of war the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” was under Nazi occupation.34 Over the course of the first few months, German security police and Lithuanian special troops worked together to murder close to one-third of the 60,000 Jews then present in the city. On the Jewish Sabbath on September 6, 1941 the remaining 40,000 Jews were enclosed within two separate ghettos in Vilna, the first “large” (30,000), the second “small” (9,000–11,000)—the combined area of these ghettos had previously housed only around 4,000 residents.35 In the small ghetto, the Balberyszskis settled in the one-room home of another family that had already been killed at Ponary, while over in the larger ghetto, Weintraub and his wife shared a 600-square-foot space with nearly forty people.36 Yet both men were correct to count themselves among the fortunate. The following day, Kruk noted that everyone who had trailed behind was driven off “in an unknown direction,” and that ghetto residents were trying hard to believe that these stragglers had merely been taken to prison.37 Balberyszski recalls that Ponary was rumored to be a third ghetto, and that when a few wounded survivors returned with tales of mass shootings, they were seldom credited.38 Kruk believed them, though. On September 4, 1941, before the ghettos were formed, he recorded what he labelled “The First Messages from Ponar”: the experiences of an eleven-year-old and a sixteen-year-old girl whom others helped escape from a mass grave, two of a total of six people who had made their way to the Jewish hospital in Vilna.39 Weintraub probably also started listening closely to these stories once his parents and two brothers were seized in one of the ghetto “clean-outs” and never came back.40 When the second, small, ghetto was liquidated in October 1941, Balberyszski and his family avoided being sent to Ponary only by bribing a German to escort them to the larger ghetto.41 It took almost an entire month to liquidate the small ghetto, but after December 1941 the situation in the remaining large ghetto became more or less stable for over a year.42 The following October, the ghetto celebrated when the Jewish police were issued leather coats and military caps bearing the Star of David, because of the permanence these uniforms implied. “It is a sign that the Jews in the Vilna Ghetto are assured of their lives,” Kruk wrote. “And what more does a Jew in the ghetto want?”43 Following the Soviet victory on the banks of the Volga, in spring 1943 the Nazis brought several thousand Jews from nearby smaller ghettos to Ponary and murdered them. After the year-long lull, this sequence of mass shootings increased Jewish resistance and flight to the partisans. German fears of unrest such as that during the Warsaw ghetto uprising probably led to the liquidation of the large Vilna ghetto, in the course of which thousands of Jews were sent to the Vaivara camp system (of which Klooga was a part) in Estonia.44 According to German figures, 7,126 Jews were deported in four groups by September 4, 1943, at which point the ghetto was closed to even the Wehrmacht, and residents were left to contend with a dwindling food supply. A final campaign on September 22–24 led to the deaths of over 3,000 either in the ghetto or more likely at Ponary. Some 1,700 Jewish women were sent to the Kaiserwald camp near Riga, including Balberyszski’s wife and daughter, and 1,600 Jewish men were deported to Estonia, among them Balberyszski and his son, Kruk, Weintraub, and Vapnik.45 Balberyszski recalls that none of his fellow passengers knew whether they were going to Estonia or Ponary until they passed the point where the rail lines divided.46 The turn to the right rather than to the left meant that most of the Jews in this wagon would live another year. The arrival of the trains from Vilna meant that in mid-1943, the Jewish population in Estonia was larger than it had ever been. The number of Estonian Jews prior to the war was small, and therefore Estonia was the first country that Hitler’s regime could declare judenfrei.47 The 1934 census in Estonia recorded only 4,434 Jews, a mere 0.4 percent of the population, nearly half of whom (2,203) lived in Tallinn. At least 400 Jews were among the “class aliens” deported from Estonia by the Soviet Union, and approximately two-thirds of the remaining Jewish population managed to evacuate eastward during the first weeks after the German invasion. Formal ghettos were never created for the approximately 1,000 Estonian Jews who were left to face the Nazi occupation, and by February 1942, German and Estonian security forces had managed to arrest and shoot 963 of these.48 When Balberyszski, Kruk, Vapnik, and Weintraub arrived at Klooga on the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 1943, the camp commandant told them that they would receive good treatment and would not have to wear yellow stars, neither of which proved true.49 The Nazi regime had rapidly developed a network of Jewish camps in Estonia to exploit the labor of the former ghetto population.50 In the written conclusion to the Extraordinary State Commission investigation of Klooga, Deputy Procurator of the Estonian SSR Udras cites the monthly reports of Bodmann, chief doctor for the camps, as having indicated that between October 1, 1943 and February 1, 1944, the number of camps in Estonia increased from ten to more than twenty. Udras reported that on average there were two camps for every district, which reflected the Nazi intent to reduce all of Estonia to a “continuous concentration camp.” Yet the advance of the Red Army soon required that the easternmost camps be eliminated: of the 6,034 prisoners in the Vaivara system as of February 20, 1944, only 2,122 (in Klooga) remained on June 26, 1944.51 On August 22, Balberyszski and his son, Weintraub, Anolik, and Kruk were part of a group of 500 Klooga inmates dispatched to build barracks and dig trenches at the nearby sub-camp of Lagedi. The prisoners worked there until September 18, 1944, when they learned they were evacuating to Germany. The Balberyszskis, Weintraub, and Anolik were among the last group to depart. On the way, the driver stopped to assist another transport before both trucks continued on to Tallinn. Yet when they reached their unknown destination, the prisoners overheard their guards being told that they had arrived too late and that everything was already finished. Their group spent the night in a jail, returning to Klooga in the morning.52 Uril Movshevish Simanovich, a fellow Vilna native who had gone in an earlier truck, later told the Extraordinary State Commission that the other Lagedi inmates were driven to a forest, and one by one made to lie on a tarpaulin covering the bodies of other prisoners. The bullet meant for Simanovich did not kill him, so he pretended to be dead and then fled before the Germans burned the corpses.53 In all, 426 Jews from the Lagedi camp were killed that day, Herman Kruk among them.54 The larger operation that took place the following day at Klooga was substantially more complicated. Vapnik was one of 300 men selected in the early morning to load and cart firewood in the forest.55 Balberyszski characterized these 300 as the “strongest and healthiest men” in the camp. When his party from Lagedi had rejoined the Klooga prisoners, everyone had been made to wait in front of the women’s building, where they were again told that the camp was being evacuated to Germany. After a few hours, the inmates had been fed “very good soup,” and Balberyszski had overheard the head of the camp instruct the cook to set aside lunch for about 300.56 Yet once their task had been completed, Vapnik was led not back to camp, but rather to a barrack near the railroad, which the men in his group were forced to enter one at a time.57 A German asked Vapnik why he was trembling—before shooting him twice. Vapnik pretended to be dead until the shooting stopped, but once he smelled gasoline he broke a window and fled. Germans burning bodies on pyres nearby fired at him, but Vapnik made it seven kilometers to a camp for Russian prisoners, where he managed to stay alive in the hospital until the Red Army arrived.58 Balberyszski told the Extraordinary State Commission that when he and the other prisoners heard prolonged machine-gun fire followed by the sounds of single gunshots, everyone understood that the 300 “strongest and healthiest” had been murdered.59 Yet those still remaining in Klooga could not run as Vapnik had, because barbed wire and Estonians with automatic weapons ringed the camp.60 Weintraub told investigators that as soon as he heard machine-gun fire he ran into the women’s building and hid in the attic.61 Anolik and his brother Benjamin similarly concealed themselves under a bed.62 Balberyszski and his son waited for hours before fleeing, until after six more “healthy people” were selected to carry two barrels of gasoline into the forest, and the Germans proceeded to lead prisoners away in groups of 50 to 100.63 More than 100 inmates managed to hide on September 19, 1944.64 That evening, Mendel and Theodore Balberyszski moved from their initial hiding place in a deserted room to join the other survivors in the attic.65 After two days, Nisan and Benjamin Anolik did the same.66 On September 23, 1944 at 10:09 p.m., a ship carrying the last German troops left Tallinn harbor; their reports on the evacuation did not mention the Jews at Klooga.67 The prisoners were scarcely an afterthought for the Germans, but survivors of the short-lived Jerusalem of Estonia would soon discover that their tale was of the utmost importance to the Soviets. The Extraordinary State Commission Goes to Work Initially, multiple Soviet institutions independently documented Nazi atrocities.68 Already in 1941, calls to centralize investigations emerged from various sections of Stalin’s government, motivated in part by a desire to preserve information during the upheaval of combat.69 On November 2, 1942, after several months of tinkering with the precise details, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, issued the decree that created the Extraordinary State Commission.70 The text was published on the front page of Pravda two days later.71 Yet for more than four months the Commission existed in name only: it did not meet until March 15, 1943.72 The very next day, the Soviet Council of People’s Commissars decreed the establishment of commissions at the republic, krai (territory), and oblast’ (region) levels—local organizations that would carry out the bulk of the investigatory work.73 Instructions designed to standardize this local activity followed on May 31, 1943: local commissions were supposed to document violence, identify perpetrators, and submit the results to Moscow within one month of a place’s liberation.74 The Extraordinary State Commission’s operations in the Baltic republics began only in the final year of war, with Ponary being the first investigation in Lithuania and Klooga the first in Estonia. On July 13, 1944, the Red Army liberated Vilna.75 Four days later, the Commission ordered that a representative from the central office in Moscow appear in the reestablished Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic by July 29.76 At that point, special military commissions had already begun collecting statements about Nazi crimes in the Baltic countries as the Red Army fought its way west.77 On July 31, the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Lithuanian SSR, Colonel of Security Bartashunas, distributed copies of the Extraordinary State Commission’s instructions to the heads of the local divisions of the NKVD, and ordered district and city NKVD chiefs to join the local commissions. “You must treat the compilation of all documents very seriously,” Bartashunas’ memorandum read, “because these documents have especially important value to the state.”78 The fearsome reputation of the NKVD under Stalin lends itself to the assumption that the police masterminded the investigation of Nazi atrocities in the liberated territories.79 Yet the NKVD played a supporting, rather than a leading, role during the Extraordinary State Commission investigation of Ponary, which lasted for more than two weeks in August 1944. NKVD detectives (who were not members of the commission) oversaw roughly half of the interrogatory questionings, in certain cases even interviewing witnesses within the Vilna district NKVD building.80 In addition, three members of the NKVD joined an investigator from the Soviet Procuracy and a former partisan to compose a preliminary two-page handwritten report after inspecting the crime scene at Ponary.81 However, local officials and intellectuals predominated on the commission that authored the subsequent official report, a document that incorporated elements of the NKVD’s investigation but also expanded upon its conclusions.82 The Extraordinary State Commission investigation of the Klooga concentration camp demonstrates a similar collaborative effort, in which the police played only one part. On September 29, 1944, four representatives of the Red Army joined three local residents and five former prisoners to compose a document that identified Herman Kruk as one of the murdered “representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia.”83 That same day, the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security, 1943–1946) and the Procuracy of the Estonian SSR began questioning survivors in the Klooga barracks, a process that would last until October 9.84 Deputy Procurator of the Estonian SSR Udras, Procurator for the Department of Police Oversight Vasil’ev, and Procurator of the Investigatory Department Egi oversaw the majority of the testimonies (twenty-five of thirty-three statements), while two NKGB senior detectives, Lieutenant of State Security Raus and Captain of State Security Zhikalov, contributed four interrogatory questionings each.85 Crucially, the Procuracy was not subordinate to the NKGB. On the first day of questioning in the Klooga barracks, NKGB Lieutenant Raus began to wrap up the statement of a survivor, whereupon Udras interrupted to ask further questions about the beatings the witness had experienced in the camp.86 Procurator Vasil’ev later questioned the lone Estonian guard in custody, who one would expect was the most significant Klooga witness then available to the commission.87 Open in new tabDownload slide Survivors of Klooga concentration camp in front of barrack; in center stands Benjamin Weintraub, ca. 1944, courtesy Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. Open in new tabDownload slide Survivors of Klooga concentration camp in front of barrack; in center stands Benjamin Weintraub, ca. 1944, courtesy Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum. Compared to this guard and other Estonian witnesses, Jewish survivors enjoyed the advantage of a presumption of innocence—within Stalinist reasoning. The forms preceding the testimonies indicate that everyone questioned had to disclose social origin, economic activity prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, and any party membership—only one of the thirty-three witnesses was a member of the Communist Party.88 Especially during the first few days, investigators were intent on establishing how the former prisoners had saved themselves.89 Yet concerns over their conduct gradually dissipated: by the final day of questioning, the focus had shifted to Jewish witnesses identifying perpetrators from photographs.90 By contrast, suspicion of local residents remained constant, as reflected in the defensiveness of the Estonian witnesses, who tended to begin testimonies by stating that they did not know anything about life in the camp—before revealing to investigators that they actually knew a great deal.91 Jewish survivors also had an information advantage. As commission investigators searched for specifics, the former prisoners gave more than what was asked of them. Procurator Egi was the sole investigator who routinely recorded “nationality” (ethnicity), but survivors inserted their Jewishness with statements such as: “After the occupation of Vilna, like all the other Jews I was put in the ghetto”; or, “They sent us to the Estonian Republic camp ‘Klooga’ together with the other Jews.”92 In addition, former inmates exercised considerable sway over the shape of their testimonies. Most recollected in detail how they had ended up in Estonia, recounting Nazi crimes they had witnessed along the way that had no bearing on the Klooga investigation. Vapnik and Weintraub both began their statements with June 1941, and Balberyszski’s account opened with the loss of his job on July 2, 1941.93 Anolik described his attempt to flee Vilna after the invasion only to be forced back before reaching Minsk; his testimony went on to follow his journey from the Vilna ghetto through three camps before landing at Klooga.94 None of the Jewish witnesses appear to have been rushed in his or her retelling. Perhaps the nature of the crimes inspired patience in the investigators, or maybe the strangeness of encountering the last remnants of a community triggered curiosity. Perhaps Extraordinary State Commission representatives understood that details make a story more real. Whatever the reason, these testimonies present parallel series of tragedies all leading to the same place. British war reporter Alaric Jacob later recalled that during his visit to Klooga in October 1944 he had been “amazed” when Balberyszski told him that it was “nice” at the camp since the Nazis had left. “It’s like the best kind of pension now,” Balberyszski had said. “We get good food and don’t have to work, just tell the Inquiry all we know.”95 Balberyszski may not have fully appreciated the significance to the Soviet state of “all we know,” or the fact that Jewish survivors were the only possible source of this information.96 It did not take long for local investigators to accept the former prisoners’ version of events. But it would require more evidence for the Soviet government to convince the rest of the world. Accounting for the Dead Hitler’s regime still had skepticism on its side. Much as Jews in the Vilna ghetto once could not fathom reports of mass murders at Ponary, Western audiences had trouble believing the accounts of massacres that began to emerge from the USSR only a few months after the German invasion. When reports of SS troops killing tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar first reached the British Joint Intelligence Committee on October 10, 1941, Chairman Victor Cavendish-Bentinck dismissed them as “the product of Slav imaginations,” an initial reaction shared by officials in the Foreign Office.97 Two years later, New York Times correspondent W.H. Lawrence did not conceal his doubts when reporting on his tour of Babi Yar. Before describing the testimony of Soviet prisoners-of-war forced to excavate and burn the corpses of victims, Lawrence stressed the lack of evidence in the ravine, writing: “On the basis of what we saw, it is impossible for this correspondent to judge the truth or falsity of the story.”98 The Extraordinary State Commission undertook to dispel such disbelief by overwhelming its audiences with information. On November 6, 1943, a little over two weeks after Lawrence’s visit, the Red Army liberated Kiev. That same day, the Commission’s Department of Crimes Registration began generating an internal series of documents entitled “Summarized Data about the Victims of German-Fascist Crimes According to Materials Received by the Extraordinary State Commission.” From the outset, this master tally included hundreds of thousands of Baltic victims, despite the fact that it would be eight months before a Commission representative set foot in the region.99 In contrast, corresponding figures for Kiev oblast’ started to appear only in mid-February 1944.100 Central data summaries incorporated the findings of local commissions in Estonia and Lithuania (though not Latvia) as of January 1, 1945, but continued to include the estimated figure of 340,000 civilian deaths for “the Baltic republics” until May 1, 1945, when local reports became available for the Latvian SSR (totals declined somewhat as more complete data continued to arrive).101 This accounting practice ensured that quotable, “documented” death tolls for the Baltic republics were available at all times. Yet the case of Babi Yar had shown that enormous numbers on their own tended to inspire incredulity. Carried out less than a year before the final Soviet victory, the efforts to document the Ponary and Klooga massacres seem to have been designed to finally eliminate speculation about “Slav imaginations.” For Ponary, investigators preserved personal papers found with the bodies, and the commission also compiled a list of “material evidence”: forty-one golden teeth, a single golden earring, a “large quantity of toothbrushes,” and so on.102 Over a period of six days, forensic medical experts exhumed and described 515 people one by one.103 Interestingly, when Jewish survivor Abram Pinkusovich Bliazer and the Lithuanian SSR Procurator reached slightly different estimates of the number of bodies buried in a series of mass graves, the commission’s official report quoted Bliazer.104 Citing witness statements and factoring in the number of bones from corpses burned on pyres, the official report estimated that at least 100,000 people were killed at Ponary over three years.105 The details made the victims less anonymous: at least one of the 100,000 was missing an earring. Klooga offered investigators the advantage of more witnesses to question and fewer corpses to examine. But Commission representatives still doggedly aimed to quantify. The procurators and NKGB senior detectives asked prisoners how many people the Germans had tortured, how many had died from hunger and illness, how many Jews had been in the Lagedi camp, how many Jews had been shot on September 19, and how many Germans had participated in the shootings.106 The September 29 report asserted that 3,000 people had been murdered ten days earlier: 800 Russian prisoners-of-war and civilians, 700 Estonian political prisoners, and 1,500 “Jews from the concentration camp.”107 Although by no means uniform, both the eyewitness statements and survivor testimony preserved in other sources largely confirm the Klooga commission’s early assessment of the total number of victims.108 W.H. Lawrence, the New York Times correspondent who had had trouble believing Soviet claims about Babi Yar, found the Klooga massacre much more convincing. He initially reported that 2,000 people had been killed on September 19, but increased that to 3,000 after touring the scene.109 The Extraordinary State Commission’s effort to corroborate witness estimates ultimately led to a decrease in the estimated number of victims at Klooga. A medical commission of three doctors managed to “separate” 491 bodies from the edges of the pyres and one end of the burned barrack. Although the medical commission could not determine precisely the number of deaths due to the “complete destruction of [most] corpses,” judging from the available evidence the doctors ventured that 1,800–2,000 people had been killed in these two locations. From this, the final report concluded that “around 2,000 people imprisoned from the peaceful population” were exterminated in Klooga on September 19.110 This figure was published in Izvestiia on November 26, 1944 as part of the Commission report on the Estonian SSR.111 The murder count at Klooga was small compared to those of Babi Yar (50,000) or Ponary (100,000), but the worth of this sum was related to its smallness: no one alleged that the number of victims at Klooga was inaccurate. The counting and classification of victims in World War II was a battle in itself. The Commission’s estimate of at least 100,000 at Ponary is twice that of post-Soviet calculations, approximately 50,000 dead (40,000 of them Jews) according to Niels Bo Poulsen’s doctoral dissertation on the Extraordinary State Commission. Yet the Commission total was, as Poulsen notes, based mainly on witness statements.112 Individual statements preserved among the Commission’s materials range from 80,000–90,000 to “not less than 200,000.”113 A Russian prisoner of war testified that the Germans themselves claimed to have shot around 100,000 people at Ponary.114 One struggles to imagine how Abram Bliazer, set to burning the corpses of other Jews, would have been able to determine that the fifth pit contained the remains of 25,000 human beings rather than more or fewer.115 Poulsen compares the Commission’s calculations with the corresponding totals arrived at by the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, an organization supporting Estonia’s application to join the European Union. The EICICH did not share the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s mission of exposing high levels of loss and victimhood;116 but while Poulsen concludes that the Extraordinary State Commission figures are 77 percent higher than the Estonian International Commission’s, it is striking that despite the different methods, sources, and working conditions, both reached the same count (2,000) for Klooga.117 The former prisoners had for the most part lived crowded together for approximately one year, and many (such as Balberyszski and Kruk) already knew each other from the Vilna ghetto.118 Judging from identification numbers, Isaak Mendelevich Ratner was one of the first prisoners in the Vaivara system: his was “2,” compared to Weintraub’s “339” or Anolik’s “818.”119 Ratner had no problem listing the four surviving children by name and age, for instance correctly identifying Theodore Balberyszski as thirteen.120 Conceiving the extent of Nazi atrocities was thus simpler for Klooga than for Ponary. Guesswork was fundamental to all Extraordinary State Commission calculations. Yet conjecture resulted at least in part from the Nazi regime’s efforts to obscure the facts. According to an internal memorandum, the first priority for the Estonian Republic Extraordinary State Commission was generating an overview suitable for both domestic and foreign distribution.121 That commission expanded its scope to calculating financial damages and investigating atrocities more comprehensively only after the official report had been published (in Russian on November 26, 1944, in English a few days later).122 Certainly Stalin’s government was reluctant to underestimate the brutality of the Germans or to lower a figure once it became “official,” but it is doubtful that any of the other Allies would have done better without access to Nazi leaders or documents. In the case of Klooga, an enormous death count was not necessary to get the world’s attention, because John Hersey, Alaric Jacob, W.H. Lawrence, and other Western observers testified to the camp’s horrors still more persuasively than the Extraordinary State Commission could. For Klooga, 2,000 victims more than sufficed. The Search for Whom to Blame The victim totals are not the only important numbers in the Extraordinary State Commission’s “Summarized Data.” Beginning in April 1945, two additional figures appeared at the bottom of the documents: the number of identified “German-fascist criminals and their accomplices,” and the number of identified “traitors-accomplices of the Germans.” As of April 1, 1945, the Commission had compiled lists of 6,572 Nazi criminals and 489 “Soviet” collaborators.123 By the following month, these figures had risen to 7,016 and 1,399.124 The Soviet push to match criminals to crimes pervaded the investigation of Klooga. Indeed, the only question investigators at Klooga asked more often than “How many?” was “Who?” During the first two days of questioning NKGB Senior Detectives Zhikalov and Raus in particular sought to pinpoint the worst among the Germans, asking the prisoners who had treated them especially cruelly.125 When it came to the Nazis, the Jewish survivors proved model witnesses. Each of the twenty-six testimonies of former Klooga inmates produced the name of at least one German criminal. Mytlia L’vovna Genzel’ identified twelve. When Zhikalov asked her to describe the “external marks” of the leaders of the camp, she seems to have recited everything she could think of. As an example, SS Unterführer Schwartz was thirty-five, tall, and brunette, with black eyes and a family living in Görlitz.126 The following day, Nisan Anolik specified that Schwartz had directed the mass shootings; he even knew Schwartz’s wife’s address: Görlitz, 21 Zeppelin Strasse, ground floor.127 Foreign observers did their part: someone passed along the Schwartz address to British war reporter Jacob during his visit to Klooga, who published it in his 1946 A Window in Moscow, 1944–1945, along with the comment: “One would like to call there on going into Germany.”128 It was more difficult for Jewish survivors to identify Estonians’ names, let alone their addresses, even though they had far outnumbered Germans at the camp. In May 1944, there were 112 Estonian guards, responsible for 2,122 prisoners.129 In contrast, only six SS guards worked at Klooga, along with three female overseers for the women; German guard personnel in all the camps of Estonia numbered no more than fifty.130 Nevertheless, inquiries about especially violent Estonian guards yielded little actionable information. Vapnik, for example, could not name any of the perpetrators of the massacre of September 19. Instead, when Egi asked who participated “the most” in the shootings, Vapnik listed every Nazi he had recognized on his way to the barrack where he was wounded: the overseer of the Jewish camp, the driver of the camp’s truck, and the cashier at camp headquarters. Yet when Egi asked which Estonians had participated in the shootings, Vapnik responded simply: “I cannot say anything exact about that, since everyone wore the German uniform and it was difficult to tell them apart.”131 Only one Klooga survivor statement refers to an Estonian guard by name. Peisakh Ben’iaminovich Rubanovich, a teenager from Vilna who lost his father in Ponary, testified about the theft and beating he had suffered at the hands of August Fritsovich Sinipalu, a member of the “Estonian Defense Battalion” that policed Klooga.132 Not long after recording Rubanovich’s statement, Vasil’ev followed up by turning to the case of Sinipalu himself (current “address” “jail #1”). 133 Out of thirty-three people questioned by commission investigators at Klooga in September and October 1944, Sinipalu alone was able to implicate Estonians the way the Procuracy and the NKGB wanted. He named the commander of 287th Battalion, the commander of its 3rd Company, and six of his fellow camp guards (and in one case provided a guard’s home address).134 “I saw how other guards beat the prisoners … with a rod,” Sinipalu said. “The others were even more harsh than I was.”135 Oddly, and perhaps significantly, Sinipalu’s attempt to mitigate his culpability may have worked: when the Extraordinary State Commission in Moscow later compiled a list of 218 Estonian “traitor-accomplices,” the names of the commanders and another guard whom Sinipalu accused of murder are listed with his statement indicated as the source, whereas Sinipalu’s own name does not appear.136 The testimonies of Rubanovich and Sinipalu gained post-Soviet afterlives. In 2006, Svobodnaia Evropa, a Russian publishing house with links to the Kremlin, released three collections of documents on the history of collaboration with the Nazis in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, connecting the phenomenon to an alleged resurgence in fascist activity in the Baltic region.137 The volume devoted to Estonia reproduced Sinipalu’s testimony ahead of any other Klooga witnesses.138 Mendel Balberyszski’s statement undoubtedly was included due to his recollection that Estonians shot two prisoners in Lagedi for taking potatoes from a field, the sole example of a Klooga inmate accusing an Estonian of murder either in the Svobodnaia Evropa collection or elsewhere within the Commission’s materials. The event does not seem to have loomed large for the prisoners. Balberyszski himself did not even mention these shootings in his 321-page memoir. Kruk recorded the deaths in his second-to-last journal entry, but did not specify that the shooters were Estonian, either because he did not know or because it did not seem important.139 In fact, independent accounts differ from Extraordinary State Commission documents by depicting minor acts of solidarity by the local Estonian population. Away from Soviet investigators, Balberyszski, Kruk, and Weintraub recounted cases of Estonians giving Jewish prisoners food, cigarettes, and even firearms.140 In contrast, the denunciations in Balberyszski’s and Kruk’s personal writings of Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis against the Jewish population are searing and unequivocal. For this reason alone, it seems impossible that either man would have tolerated or overlooked similar acts by Estonians.141 Highlighting this discrepancy is not meant to suggest that the Holocaust took a fundamentally different course in these two Baltic republics, or that Estonians necessarily comported themselves “better” and Lithuanians “worse.” Yet Ponary and Klooga were distinct as crime scenes: the first involved neighbors, with all the sentiments that relationship entails, while the second had a discrete group of men, women, and children deposited in an environment in which comparatively limited violence had taken place until the end.142 The Extraordinary State Commission investigations in Ponary and Klooga also proceeded differently, and as in the case of estimating the number of victims, the crucial differentiating factor here is not any particular Soviet animus. Condemnations of Lithuanian collaborators such as those expressed in Balberyszski’s and Kruk’s personal writings are scarce among the Commission’s documentation of Ponary certainly in part because investigators did not make explicit inquiries. However, statements collected by investigators are largely silent on this subject also because by the time the Commission arrived in Vilna, Balberyszski, Kruk, and nearly all of their peers were no longer there. For this reason, in contrast to the case of Klooga, the Svobodnaia Evropa publication for Lithuania required a variety of evidence to demonstrate the horrors of Ponary: the official report, one testimony from the Extraordinary State Commission’s records, the confession of a Lithuanian participant in the shootings obtained by the KGB in 1967, and a letter preserved in the Jewish Museum in Vilna (dropped by two women on their way to be murdered and addressed to their “Jewish brothers and sisters”).143 If these women had been “luckier,” they might have lived a little longer—in Estonia. Red Stars and Yellow Stars The German names had value for the Soviet Union. The central Commission completed the tally of destruction of property in Estonia on April 13, 1945, the first for the Baltic republics.144 On the basis of 40,549 declarations the Commission determined that the Estonian SSR had suffered economic damage worth 47,222,599,000 rubles, for which 170 people were primarily to blame.145 Yet fewer than one-fourth of the latter were accused specifically of responsibility for the property losses. Of the 170 men identified on the attached list of “German invaders,” sixty-two were accused of crimes in camp settings, thirty-two of these in Klooga. Weintraub’s statement is cited twice, Vapnik’s five times, Balberyszski’s six, and Anolik’s no fewer than nine. The Commission reproduced the address for Schwartz’s wife that Anolik had volunteered, along with the physical descriptions of eight Nazis from the testimony of Mytlia Genzel’ (although her more colorful observations, such as Bodmann being “grumpy” and having a “meaty face,” were edited out).146 Testimony compensated for the lack of direct evidence to support Soviet claims for reparations, which from the beginning were meant to encompass not only material destruction, but also the loss of all revenue that had been planned for the period extending from the German invasion until prewar conditions were completely restored.147 Thus, the Extraordinary State Commission factored in a forecasted future that had been thwarted. The equivalent for human losses would have included all the children who had not been born due to the deaths of millions of women. The Commission published its final official report, a summary of material damage, in Izvestiia on September 13, 1945. This document asserted that the USSR had suffered economic losses in the amount of 679 billion rubles as the consequence of Nazi occupation.148 The Soviet claim for 679 billion rubles in reparations figured in the text of the indictment at the Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg.149 The Klooga massacre features prominently within this indictment: the shooting of “2,000 peaceful citizens” in one day is listed first of all the mass killings in the Baltic republics.150 The only other times that the indictment mentions Estonia is in the context of material damage: the removal of 10,000 works of art, the destruction of medical institutions, the plunder of livestock, and so forth.151 Testimonies from Klooga survivors were among the documents that Stalin’s government submitted at Nuremberg, and during the trial itself the Soviet prosecution read aloud from Extraordinary State Commission reports to demonstrate both how greatly the Klooga inmates suffered and how much property loss the Estonian SSR sustained.152 Nazi atrocities supported the Soviet demand for economic restitution in two ways. First, the extent and nature of the mass murders generated a moral claim for compensation, even when the violence was unrelated to property. Second, the sheer volume of documentation of crimes against people diminished the attention paid to evidence of material losses:153 the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg submitted evidence of crimes against people first, a process that lasted nine days.154 By the time the Soviet team was ready to move on to economic damages, the president of the court, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, explicitly asked how much longer the Soviet delegation was likely to take.155 After two more days, when the Soviet prosecution turned to the destruction of cultural resources in the Baltic republics, Lord Justice Lawrence requested (with little success) that the Soviet team summarize its claims, remarking: “It is difficult to assimilate all this vast amount of detail.”156 The use of Commission documentation to support less well-grounded claims does not ipso facto indicate that this documentation was unreliable. Rather, debatable economic aspirations required the strongest possible record of violent crimes, so that third parties would not question every detail. The distinction between the evidence and its instrumental use can be observed in the myriad applications of the information assembled at Klooga. In 1944, the commission’s conclusions illustrated the triumph of a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that had survived Hitler’s onslaught.157 In 1963, these same conclusions were reframed as cautionary history, not-so-subtly reminding the Estonian population of their supposed happiness under Soviet power and the crimes of “Estonian quislings—local fascists and bourgeois nationalists.”158 In 2006, these conclusions were presented to suggest that this new member of NATO and the European Union was not as sympathetic as it seemed: Estonia had failed to confront its “bloody trail of Nazism.”159 In each of these cases the document itself was not altered; only the context had changed. The one constant is that the Kremlin’s overt pursuit of political goals threatened to dilute the veracity of the findings of the Extraordinary State Commission’s local auxiliaries.160 Soviet-era characterizations emphasized popular participation in the Commission’s investigations: seven million citizens reportedly collected 54,000 statements, 250,000 witness protocols, and 4,000,000 documents on economic losses stemming from the Nazi occupation.161 Post-Soviet evaluations have yet to consider in earnest the full extent of the Commission’s work. More than one author has compared the Extraordinary State Commission in Moscow to the tip of an iceberg resting on a network of local commissions operating below the surface.162 Nevertheless, the assumption persists that scholars can make a single judgment about Commission materials. Local investigations were carried out by different kinds of people, some fluent in Bolshevik, others participating in a Soviet project for the first time. Therefore, local commissions need to be evaluated like individual witnesses. The historian must establish the local surrounding sources to determine what it was possible to know under wartime conditions, rather than fact-checking investigations based on what we know now. Mendel Balberyszski and Abram Bliazer likely had the same desire to hold the perpetrators to account, but Balberyszski was better situated to give more accurate information. In cases such as Bliazer’s, errors of fact should not inescapably connote ulterior motives. Reflexively attributing discrepancies in Extraordinary State Commission investigations to orders from Moscow gives the Soviet wartime government too much credit. Such automatic distrust can be as problematic as the opposite use of Commission documents uncritically or out of context. Marina Sorokina’s seminal but preliminary 2005 study argues that using Extraordinary State Commission materials without a clear understanding of the Commission’s “true reasons” for existence allows the “Stalinist school of falsification” to continue to determine the historical program very much as it did during the Soviet period. She cites unanswered questions, such as why so many completed reports were never published, to suggest that the Commission also pursued “hidden goals.”163 While Sorokina made a lasting contribution by critically interrogating the evidence, we now know much more about how diffuse and variable efforts were in practice. If there were indeed coherent sets of “true reasons” and “hidden goals,” clearly no one told the people preparing unpublishable reports at the local level.164 A better term might be “hidden uses,” and even these varied greatly from place to place. The objectives pursued in the Baltic republics were not identical with those pursued in Kiev or in Katyn. The need to document was pervasive, and witnesses to the Holocaust (and other Nazi crimes) were diverse. The motivations of the two women who dropped their letter on the way to Ponary and the Commission representatives who preserved the materials they found buried there were surely different, but they worked in parallel to document the murders the Nazi government wanted to conceal. Unlike some historians, Jewish survivors did not repudiate the Soviet effort to document and litigate on their behalf. Before emigrating to the United States, Nisan Anolik testified at the 1946 Soviet war crimes trial in Riga: “I now appear here in the name of hundreds and thousands of people cruelly tortured to death by the Germans. Their ghosts stand behind me.”165 At home in Australia, Mendel Balberyszski wrote that commission investigators were “kind enough” to return the original of his statement, which he published in his memoir.166 Theodore Balberyszski, Benjamin Anolik, and Abram Vapnik outlasted even the Soviet Union. In Israel, they served on the editorial board for a 1997 commemorative publication dedicated to “our dead brothers.”167 This text reproduced both Soviet press coverage of the Riga trial and a summary of the conclusions of the Extraordinary State Commission’s investigation of the Klooga concentration camp.168 The specific circumstances surrounding the liquidation of Klooga have made it possible for the present study to largely confirm these conclusions by comparing the Commission’s findings with other sources, but similar cross-referencing will obviously not be possible in every case. Analysis that spans a broader range of the Extraordinary State Commission’s wartime activities will be necessary before we can confidently assess investigations of mass killings not reflected anywhere else. Until then, rather than leave the dead buried, historians must continue to read for Soviet bias while also remaining alert to our own faulty assumptions and prejudices. Like the crimes themselves, the investigations were supported by a government but carried out by individuals. In the barracks of Klooga in 1944 people as varied as the Balberyszskis, the Anoliks, Soviet procurators, and NKGB detectives joined forces to ensure that a record of the deaths of Herman Kruk and thousands of others like him would survive the Nazi occupation. Paula Chan is a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies completing a dissertation at Georgetown University that examines local auxiliaries of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic region. She holds master’s degrees in Russian Studies (Georgetown) and Library Science (Pratt Institute). Prior to Georgetown, she worked as an archivist. Endnotes 1. Little scholarship has focused on Klooga. Mark (Meir) Dvorjecki, a survivor of the Vilna ghetto and five camps in Estonia, completed his doctoral dissertation on the Estonian camp system in 1967 (published in Hebrew and Yiddish in 1970): Histoire des camps Nazis en Estonie [1941–1944]: L'évolution du système concentrationnaire, la vie quotidienne dans les camps, le non-conformisme et le mouvement de la résistance des déportés (Tel Aviv: Aout, 1967). In 1989, Alfred Streim published an overview of the findings of German courts: “Konzentrationslager auf dem Gebiet der Sowjetunion,” Dachauer Hefte 5 (1989), 174–87. More recently, Riho Västrik has examined the destruction of the Klooga prisoner population and the Vaivara camp system as a whole: “Klooga koonduslaager—Vaivara süsteemi koletu lõpp,” Vikerkaar, no. 8 (2001): 147–55. Anton Weiss-Wendt also devoted a chapter to Klooga in his study of collaboration in Estonia: Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 301–22. 2. The Estonian Republic Extraordinary State Commission identified prewar addresses for 103 of the 108 survivors: ninety-two were from Vilna, and eleven were from Kaunas. Eesti Rahvusarhiiv (ERA), f. (fond) R-364, op. (register) 1, d. (file) 204, ll. (pages) 1–3. 3. Mendel Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron: The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941–1945: An Eyewitness Account, ed. Theodore Balberyszski (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2010 <Yiddish, 1967>), 317–18. 4. Alaric Jacob, A Window in Moscow, 1944–1945 (London: Collins, 1946), 232. The Extraordinary State Commission’s full title reads: “Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and Their Accomplices and the Damage Inflicted by Them on Citizens, Collective Farms, Social Organizations, State Enterprises, and Institutions of the USSR.” 5. Marina Sorokina, “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” Kritika 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 802. In the present article, “Commission” refers to the central organ in Moscow, whereas local auxiliaries appear as “commissions.” 6. In contrast to the often indiscriminate mass shootings in Ponary forest during the first months of war, by the time the Vaivara camp system was established in 1943, German occupation authorities had come to value the use of Jewish slave labor. Consequently, the Nazi regime kept Klooga inmates alive and working until the last possible moment. Meelis Maripuu and Riho Västrik, “Prison Camps in Estonia in 1941–1944,” in Estonia 1940–1945: Reports of the Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, ed. Toomas Hiio, Meelis Maripuu, and Indrek Paavle (Tallinn: Estonian Foundation for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity, 2006), 680; Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 309–11. No Sonderkommando 1005 (forced labor units to destroy remains at Nazi killing sites) was necessary in Klooga: by 1944 the Germans were burning victims as they killed them. Shmuel Spector, “Aktion 1005—Effacing the Murder of Millions,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5, no. 2 (1990): 167–68. 7. John Garrard, “The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Interpreting Newly Opened Russian Archives,” East European Jewish Affairs 25, no. 2 (1995): 3–40; Marian R. Sanders, “Extraordinary Crimes in Ukraine: An Examination of Evidence Collection by the Extraordinary State Commission of the U.S.S.R., 1942–1946” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1995). Garrard and Sanders both regard the witness statements collected by investigators as more or less genuine. However, Garrard based his argument on discrepancies between eyewitness testimony and the Berdichev commission’s official report, while Sanders’ interpretation hinges upon investigators’ lack of sympathy for the suffering and difficult choices that Ukrainians had faced during the war. 8. Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, NE; Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009), xiii. On the new availability of sources as drivers of the evolution of the historiography of the Holocaust more generally, see Martin Dean, “Holocaust Research and Generational Change: Regional and Local Studies Since the Cold War,” in Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation, ed. Doris L. Bergen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 203–21. 9. Garrard, “The Nazi Holocaust in the Soviet Union,” 8–9. 10. Lev Bezymenskii, “Informatsiia po-sovetski,” Znamia, no. 5 (1998): 196–97; Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 829. 11. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 882, i. (image) 0042. 12. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 1, i. 0011. 13. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 418, i. 0006. This article will refer to the present-day capital of Lithuania as Vilna throughout, even though some material from the Soviet government uses the term “Vilnius,” because the Jewish witnesses themselves referred to their home as “Vilna.” 14. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 73, i. 0052. 15. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 98, ii. 0052–53. 16. For instance, the Soviet Information Bureau (1941–1961) published an English-language pamphlet in 1941 that claimed the USSR had been compelled to annex the Baltic region because “the policy chosen by the Baltic States was, in effect, diametrically opposed to their own interests.” Soviet War News on behalf of the Soviet Information Bureau, The Soviet Union, Finland and the Baltic States (London: Co-operative Printing Society, 1941), 20. 17. See, for example, Soviet Information Bureau proposals for publications and counter-propaganda in late 1944: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 8581, op. 1, d. 96, ll. 40–43; d. 105, l. 32. 18. Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015), 130–31. 19. Ruth Bettina Birn, “Klooga,” in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume I: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Sub-Camps Under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), Part B, ed. Geoffrey P. Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 1502. 20. Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 318–20. As Weiss-Wendt points out, we have as much evidence about Klooga as about all other camps in Estonia combined. 21. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 320. 22. During the investigation of Klooga local commissions also investigated atrocities at the Vaivara sub-camps in Ereda and Kiviõli, but the paucity of survivors meant that these two investigations had only five Jewish witnesses between them (compared to twenty-six at Klooga). For these testimonies, see: USHMM RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 4, ii. 0114–35; d. 2, ii. 0015–18; 0027–30. As a consequence of this dearth of evidence, even in the post-Soviet period Klooga serves as a representative for the entire Vaivara system; historians extrapolate from it when discussing inmates and daily life at other camps. See for instance: Riho Västrik and Meelis Maripuu, “Vaivara Concentration Camp in 1943–1944,” in Hiio, Maripuu, and Paavle, Estonia 1940–1945, 724–25, 728. 23. Vasilii Grossman and Il’ia Erenburg, eds., Chernaia kniga o zlodeiskom povsemestnom ubiistve evreev nemetsko-fashistskimi zakhvatchikami vo vremenno-okkupirovannykh raionakh Sovetskogo Soiuza i v lageriakh unichtozheniia Pol’shi vo vremia voiny 1941–1945 gg (Vilnius: IAd, 1993), 395–99; Il’ia Altman, ed., Neizvestnaia “Chernaia kniga”: Materialy k “Chernoi knige” pod redaktsiei Vasiliia Grossmana i Il'ii Erenburga (Mosow: AST, CORPUS, 2015), 337–40; John Hersey, Here to Stay (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 163–78. Upon first mention, this study uses the most complete name available, which varies from first name, patronymic, and last name (for Extraordinary State Commission witnesses) to last name only (Soviet investigators and accused perpetrators). 24. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, xxxii, xxviii–xxix. 25. Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania, ed. Benjamin Harshav (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 <Yiddish, 1961>), 249, xvii, xlvii. 26. Concluded on August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact’s secret protocol gave the USSR a free hand to occupy Estonia and Latvia, and two subsequent secret protocols transferred Lithuania as well to the Soviet “sphere.” English-language translations have been published in Bronis J. Kaslas, ed., The USSR-German Aggression Against Lithuania (New York: Robert Speller & Sons, 1973), 109–12, 129–31, 286–87. 27. Kruk, Last Days, 1. 28. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, xv, 5. 29. Kruk, Last Days, 28. 30. Soviet War News (Soviet Information Bureau), The Soviet Union, Finland and the Baltic States, 29–32. 31. K.V. Bazilevich et al., Istoriia SSSR: Uchebnik dlia X klassa srednei shkoly, ed. A. M. Pankratova (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe uchebno-pedagogicheskoe izdatel’stvo Narkomprosa RSFSR, 1941), 351. 32. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 13. Balberyszski’s family and others were not deported for being Jewish, but rather as “class aliens.” 33. Kruk, Last Days, 73–74. 34. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 3, 17; Kruk, Last Days, 218n9, 33n30. Vilna bore the nickname “the Jerusalem of Lithuania” due to its significance as a cultural center. 35. Elżbieta Rojowska and Martin Dean, “Wilno,” in The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume II: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe, Part B, ed. Martin Dean and Mel Hecker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 1148–49; Yitzhak Arad, “Vilna,” in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), vol. 4, 1573. 36. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 85–86; Hersey, Here to Stay, 165. 37. Kruk, Last Days, 105–106. 38. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 105–106. As early as July 10, 1941 rumors about the shootings at Ponary reached the Vilna Judenrat (“Jewish Council” appointed by the Germans to manage internal ghetto affairs), but were ignored. Kruk, The Last Days, 66. 39. Kruk, The Last Days, 90–92. “Ponar” is the Yiddish variant of the Russian “Ponary” (in Lithuanian: “Paneriai”). 40. Hersey, Here to Stay, 166. 41. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0136. 42. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 145; Rojowska and Dean, “Wilno,” 1149. 43. Kruk, Last Days, 381. 44. Martin Dean, “Lithuania Region (Generalkommissariat Litauen),” in Dean and Hecker, USHMM Encyclopedia, 1035–36. 45. Rojowska and Dean, “Wilno,” 1151; Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 271, 286; Kruk, Last Days, 704; Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 302; USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0050. Nisan Anolik told commission investigators that he had been deported on September 3, 1944. Jews deemed likely to resist were evidently the first to go; Kruk identifies Anolik as a Jewish policeman who was fired due to his activity in the ghetto underground. USHMM RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0043; Västrik and Maripuu, “Vaivara Concentration Camp in 1943–1944,” 720; Kruk, Last Days, 577, 667–70. 46. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 275. 47. Ruth Bettina Birn, “Collaboration with Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe: The Case of the Estonian Security Police,” Contemporary European History 10, no. 2 (July 2001): 187; Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 343. 48. Martin Dean, “Estonia and Latvia Regions (Generalkommissariat Estland und Generalkommissariat Lettland),” in Dean and Hecker, USHMM Encyclopedia, 992, 995. 49. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 286–87. 50. Ruth Bettina Birn, “Vaivara Main Camp,” in Megargee, USHMM Encyclopedia, 1492. 51. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0282–83. Extraordinary State Commission records include only summaries and translations of Bodmann’s reports. The originals are preserved at the Estonian History Museum in Tallinn. Västrik and Maripuu, “Vaivara Concentration Camp in 1943–1944,” 726. 52. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0137, 0059, 0043; Kruk, Last Days, 702–703. 53. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0099. 54. Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 309; Kruk, Last Days, 705. 55. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0050–51. 56. Ibid., i. 0137. 57. Ibid., i. 0051. 58. Grossman and Erenburg, Chernaia kniga, 398–99. It seems possible that camp personnel let Vapnik stay because they knew the Germans were about to retreat. 59. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0137. 60. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 314. 61. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0059. 62. Ibid., i. 0044. 63. Ibid., i. 0138. 64. Birn, “Klooga,” 1502. 65. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0138. 66. Ibid., i. 0044. 67. Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 310. 68. Niels Bo Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes: An Analysis of the Commission’s Investigative Work in War and Post-War Stalinist Society” (Ph.D. diss., Copenhagen University and Danish Institute of International Studies, 2004), 38; Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 813. For the origins of the Commission Poulsen and Sorokina rely primarily on the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation and Propaganda fond at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (f. 17, op. 125). 69. Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 806–15. Here Sorokina also draws from the records of Molotov’s secretariat, in the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (f. 6, op. 4). 70. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 1, ii. 0003–12. 71. Sanders, “Extraordinary Crimes in Ukraine,” 74. 72. GARF, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 407, l. 1. 73. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 1a, i. 0015. Stalin personally signed this decree; Molotov signed other decrees relating to the Commission. Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 824n81. 74. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 6, ii. 0002–04. Deadlines for submission of local materials were rarely met, and requests to extend them frequently appeared as agenda points at Commission meetings in Moscow. Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes,” 71. 75. Rojowska and Dean, “Wilno,” 1150. 76. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 138, i. 0089. 77. USHMM, RG-22.016, f. 32, op. 11302, d. 244, ll. 273–76, 278, 288, 306; f. 335, op. 5136, d. 151, l. 44. In early November 1941, the Red Army Chief Political Administration directed all units to solicit testimony on enemy war crimes upon liberating Soviet territory. These investigations were usually rushed and free from oversight by state security organs. For a brief comparative discussion of military commissions and the Extraordinary State Commission, see Mordechai Altshuler, “The Holocaust in the Soviet Mass Media during the War and in the First Postwar Years Reexamined,” Yad Vashem Studies 39, no. 2 (2011): 153–58. 78. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 3, ii. 0102–0104. Bartashunas later served as a member of the commission for the Lithuanian SSR. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 78, i. 0130. 79. For an example of this viewpoint see Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 824. 80. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 1, ii. 0119–26. 81. Ibid., ii. 0014–15. 82. Ibid., ii. 0004–13. The Ponary commission included a representative of the Vilna district executive committee, three professors, a writer, a teacher, a doctor, and a lieutenant colonel, with a deputy to the Supreme Soviet for the Lithuanian SSR serving as chairman. 83. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 882, ii. 0042–46. Herman Kruk is listed as a “historian and author of multiple works.” 84. In February 1941 counterintelligence, espionage, and internal political security were transferred from the NKVD to the NKGB (Narodnyi komissariat gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti). Political security was placed back under the NKVD after the Nazi invasion, only to be separated again on April 16, 1943. Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 106, 124. There is no substantive difference between the NKVD’s role in the Ponary investigation and the role played by the NKGB at Klooga. 85. “Egi” was almost certainly a transliteration of the common Estonian surname “Jõgi,” but there is no ready way to verify this because he conducted all questioning in Russian, the language that Soviet investigators and the Jews of Vilna shared. 86. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0235. 87. Ibid., ii. 0021–22. 88. Ibid., i. 0036. The question about prerevolutionary economic activity was a standard entry even in the Estonian-language forms, and seems to have been taken seriously despite not making much sense in the Baltic context. Balberyszski’s profession (pharmacist) was listed, whereas for Anolik, Vapnik, and Weintraub, born after 1917, this question was marked “not applicable.” Ibid., ii. 0123, 0037, 0045, 0053. 89. For instance, on September 29 and 30, 1944, NKGB Lieutenant Raus asked two survivors to explain how they had “succeeded in avoiding that sad fate which befell the majority” of Klooga inmates. In both cases, he asked a follow-up question to establish how exactly a Jewish inmate had escaped execution. Ibid., ii. 0234, 0245–46. 90. Ibid., ii. 0094, 0104. 91. Ibid., ii. 0076, 0091. 92. Ibid., ii. 0030, 0069. This distinction seems to reflect Egi’s personal style more than the obfuscation of other investigators: Egi was also the only one who consistently noted where he had conducted interrogatory questionings. 93. Ibid., ii. 0050, 0059, 0136. 94. Ibid., i. 0043. 95. Jacob, A Window in Moscow, 234. 96. Reports on the Klooga massacre that do not incorporate survivor testimony suffer from minor factual errors and vagueness. For example, see the reports composed by the Deputy People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Kruglov and chief of the Political Section of the Red Army’s Leningrad Front Gen. Lt. Kholostov: GARF, f. 7021, op. 149, d. 29, ll. 15–16; d. 90, ll. 28–31. 97. Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 16. 98. W.H. Lawrence, “50,000 Kiev Jews Reported Killed,” New York Times, November 29, 1943 (delayed publication of October 22, 1943 cable). Decades later, Lawrence wrote that the Western Allies’ false claims about German crimes during World War I had instilled in him a “natural skepticism and inherent disbelief of all wartime atrocity stories.” Babi Yar was the first site of an alleged atrocity that he had ever visited, Lawrence explained, and his “skeptical mind simply rejected the Russian claims.” Bill Lawrence, Six Presidents, Too Many Wars (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), 90, 92. 99. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 125, d. 3, ii. 0001–02. 100. Ibid., 0018. The Department of Crimes Registration issued these reports at first every ten days, and then only once per month beginning July 1, 1944 (just before the liberation of Vilna). 101. Ibid., ii. 0066, 0068–69, 0071–72, 0074, 0076–77. 102. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 1, ii. 0085–0100, 0183–84. 103. Ibid., ii. 0191–0261. 104. Ibid., ii. 0138, 0180, 0010. Bliazer’s estimate was a little higher: approximately 68,000 victims, compared to the Procurator’s 62,000. 105. Ibid., i. 0012. 106. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0255, 0215, 0177, 0229. 107. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 882, i. 0045. 108. See the postwar claims of Balberyszski and the Anolik brothers: Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 320; Grossman and Erenburg, Chernaia kniga, 399; Altman, Neizvestnaia “Chernaia kniga,” 340. 109. W.H. Lawrence, “Germans Accused of Burning 2,000,” New York Times, September 28, 1944; W.H. Lawrence, “Nazi Death Camp a Scene of Horror,” New York Times, October 6, 1944. John Hersey still worried about convincing Western audiences. In a letter to his wife on February 9, 1945 he wrote: “the overwhelming thing is the impression of the Germans. I just do not know what or how to write to get across what those people are capable of doing. I’m positive that American readers simply will not believe those things. Some people right here in Moscow have told me that they had a hard time believing the Weintraub story from Talinn [sic]”; quoted in Robert Franciosi, “Designing John Hersey’s The Wall: W.A. Dwiggins, George Salter, and the Challenges of American Holocaust Memory,” Book History 11 (2008): 273n53. 110. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0291–92. 111. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 73, ii. 0052–53. 112. Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes,” 128. Poulsen's dissertation was one of the first comprehensive studies of the Soviet investigation of Nazi crimes; as such, its inquiry is limited to the operations of the central Extraordinary State Commission and other state organs in Moscow. Poulsen argues that the Commission’s published reports (especially on numbers of victims) were tailored to support both domestic propaganda and foreign policy objectives; but also that individual items of evidence such as witness testimony and trophy documents have considerable research value when examined critically and in conjunction with other sources. 113. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 94, d. 1, ii. 0102, 0145. 114. Ibid., i. 0016. 115. Ibid., i. 0138. 116. In 1998 international pressure related to their pending applications for EU membership led all three Baltic states to establish international historical commissions to confront the record of the Holocaust on their respective territories. The Estonian International Commission also investigated the Soviet occupation, publishing three reports devoted to the periods of 1940–1941, 1941–1944, and 1944–1991 (it was dissolved in 2008). Eva-Clarita Pettai, “Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against Humanity,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, ed. Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), vol. 3, 117–21. 117. Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes,” 130. 118. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 192, 199, 222. 119. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 882, i. 0046; d. 1, i. 0061. Both the USHMM encyclopedia and the Estonian International Commission suggest that there was a single numbering system at Vaivara, and that inmates retained the numbers they received upon arrival even if they were transferred to other camps. Yet if this was indeed the practice, either numbers were reused or there must have been exceptions. When Mendel and Theodore Balberyszski reached Klooga they found 655 prisoners already there and yet were assigned numbers 27 and 28. Birn, “Vaivara Main Camp,” 1493; Västrik and Maripuu, “Vaivara Concentration Camp in 1943–1944,” 725; Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 286 and the reproductions of work registration cards following p. 318. 120. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0208. 121. GARF, f. 7021, op. 117, d. 27, l. 172. 122. Soviet Government Statements on Nazi Atrocities (London: Hutchinson, n.d.), 319–20. Soviet War News published an English-language translation of the Extraordinary State Commission’s official report on the Estonian SSR in two installments on November 28 and 29, 1944. It released English-language translations of Commission reports within a week or two of their appearance in the domestic press. 123. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 125, d. 3, i. 0074. 124. Ibid., i. 0077. According to a report that Commission chairman Nikolai Mikhailovich Shvernik sent to Stalin and state and Party leader Grigorii Maksimilianovich Malenkov at the end of 1945, the names of German criminals were entered into a “special book” that was copied and distributed to the NKVD, NKGB, and SMERSH (a wartime military security agency); lists of Soviet collaborators were transferred only to the NKVD. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 125, d. 329, l. 4. A top state, Party, and organizational leader, Shvernik participated in Stalin’s purges during the 1930s, oversaw the evacuation of Soviet industry in 1941, and would subsequently help Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev undertake de-Stalinization. 125. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0257, 0245. 126. Ibid., ii. 0257–58. 127. Ibid., i. 0044. 128. Jacob, A Window to Moscow, 235. 129. Birn, “Klooga,” 1501. 130. Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 304, 258. 131. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, ii. 0051–52. In addition to a common uniform, there is good reason for Vapnik’s inability to identify the Estonians: according to testimony collected for a 1970s trial in West Germany, Nazi leadership recruited an Estonian SS unit, still in training, to guard the camp that day, soldiers who had not visited Klooga prior to September 19, 1944. The extent to which Estonians participated in the massacre of Klooga prisoners remains unclear. For two divergent viewpoints citing the same sources (Bundesarchiv-Außenstelle Ludwigsburg, case number AR-Z 233/59), see: Birn, “Collaboration,” 191; and Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred, 316–17. 132. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0087. 133. Ibid., i. 0013. 134. Ibid, ii. 0021–22; d. 17a, ii. 0162–65. 135. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0021. 136. GARF, f. 7021, op. 127, d. 189, ll. 10, 29, 27. 137. Estoniia. Krovavyi sled natsizma: 1941–1944 gody. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniiakh estonskikh kollaboratsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Evropa, 2006); Latviia pod igom natsizma: Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov (Moscow: Evropa, 2006); Tragediia Litvy: 1941–1944. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniiakh litovskikh kollaboratsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Evropa, 2006). At the time, Svobodnaia Evropa was run by Gleb Pavlovsky, who subsequently lost enthusiasm for President Putin’s leadership. See Gleb Pavlovsky, “Russian Politics Under Putin: The System Will Outlast the Master,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2016. For additional background on the Svobodnaia Evropa document publications in the context of Holocaust studies, see David Shneer, “Probing the Limits of Documentation,” Kritika 10, no. 1 (2009): 121–33. 138. Estoniia, 71–99. 139. Kruk, Last Days, 704. 140. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 307–308; Kruk, Last Days, 704; Hersey, Here to Stay, 169, 171. 141. For Balberyszski’s and Kruk’s observations on Lithuanian violence against the Jewish community in Vilna see Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 33–34; Kruk, Last Days, 60, 68. 142. Estonia was unique among the Baltic republics for not having even partially mobilized its military before acquiescing to Soviet rule in 1940, and there were reportedly no pogroms at all during the Nazi occupation. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 193; Snyder, Black Earth, 179–80. It is worth noting that the Jewish population in prewar Estonia was small enough that antisemitism and obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” could not approach the levels in Lithuania. 143. Tragediia Litvy, 46–72. The letter concluded, “Farewell, farewell. We call upon the whole world for revenge,” and was deliberately written in Polish because the authors believed that anyone who found a letter written in Hebrew characters would burn it unread. 144. Comprehensive tallies of economic losses for the Latvian and Lithuanian SSRs followed in August 1945. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 119, ii. 0003–06; d. 121, ii. 0003–06. 145. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 99, ii. 0003–06, 0028–54. According to the official exchange rate, this sum was equal to approximately $8,909,924,340 in U.S. currency in 1945. Exchange rate of 5.3 rubles per 1 USD taken from: Tsentral'nyi bank Rossisskoi Federatsii, “Dollar SShA,” Kursy valiut za period do 01.07.1992, http://cbr.ru/Content/Document/File/41420/USD.xls (accessed July 16, 2019). 146. USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 99, ii. 0028–54. To compare, see ibid., i. 0030; and USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 97, d. 1, i. 0258. 147. See the Extraordinary State Commission’s instructions for calculating damage: USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 6, ii. 0005–17. For an overview of the process of establishing Soviet reparations claims, see Nathalie Moine, “‘Fascists have destroyed the fruit of my honest work.’ The Great Patriotic War, International Law and the Property of Soviet Citizens,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 61 (2013): 172–95; Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes,” 286–97. 148. In 1945 this was equivalent to ~128 billion USD. Losses in the Estonian SSR purportedly totaled 16 billion rubles (~3 billion USD). USHMM, RG-22.002M, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 124, i. 0212. 149. International Military Tribunal (IMT), Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945–1 October 1946 (Nuremberg 1947–1949), vol. 1, 60. 150. Ibid., vol. 1, 48. A Klooga victim was also the only clearly identifiable Jew (by the yellow star insignia) to appear in Film Documents of Atrocities Committed by the German-Fascist Invaders, the Soviet film shown at Nuremberg. Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 194. 151. IMT, vol. 1, 59–60. 152. GARF, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 369, l. 1; IMT, vol. 7, 582–83; vol. 8, 39–40. Extraordinary State Commission materials did not need to be substantiated: Article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal stipulated that “acts and documents of the committees set up in the various Allied countries for the investigation of war crimes” were to be accepted as incontrovertible evidence. IMT, vol. 1, 15. 153. As legal historian George Ginsburgs has pointed out, the Western Allies did not share the Soviet preoccupation with economic reparations. Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), 71. This disinterest is reflected in the historiography, where the subject of the basis of the USSR’s restitution claims has remained surprisingly underexplored. For a brief discussion of the inherent unverifiability of the Extraordinary State Commission’s calculations, see Pavel Nikolaevich Knyshevskii, Dobycha. Tainy germanskikh reparatsii (Moscow: Tovarishchestvo “Soratnik,” 1994), 4–5. 154. IMT., vol. 7, 146–602. 155. Ibid., vol. 7, 602. 156. Ibid., vol. 8, 96. 157. “Zakliuchenie zamestitelia prokurora Estonskoi SSR po materialam rassledovaniia o massovom rasstrele i sozhzhenii zakliuchennykh v kontslagere Kloga,” Sovetskaia Estoniia, November 12, 1944. 158. Nemetsko-fashistskaia okkupatsiia v Estonii (1941–1944): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tallinn: Institut istorii partii pri TsK KP Estonii, 1963), 62–68, 3–4. 159. Estoniia, 57–70, 3. 160. For example, in a recent publication Andrew Wilson, Professor of Ukrainian Studies at University College London, dismissed the Svobodnaia Evropa texts as “supposedly based on archival research” and directed at resurrecting “Soviet myths” about wartime collaboration in the Baltic region. Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 229n31, 176. 161. Nataliia Sergeevna Lebedeva, Podgotovka Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Moscow: “Nauka,” 1975), 28–29. See also S. Rozenblit and G. Aleksandrov, “Zametki o Niurnbergskom protsesse glavnykh nemetskikh voennykh prestupnikov,” Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’, no. 3 (1946): 20–26; A. M. Sinitsyn, “Chrezvychainye organy sovetskogo gosudarstva v gody Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny,” Voprosy istorii, no. 2 (1955): 32–43. 162. Kiril Feferman, “Soviet Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR: Documenting the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no. 4 (2003): 587; Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 823. 163. Sorokina, “People and Procedures,” 806, 804. The Commission drafted fifty-five official reports but published only twenty-seven; the unpublished Commission reports are located in GARF, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 142–78. Poulsen, “The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on War Crimes,” 172, 175n620. 164. The final report on Nazi atrocities was also never published. Yet as late as October 1945, multiple members of the central Extraordinary State Commission wrote to multiple leaders in the Soviet government (including Molotov) to request permission to publish their conclusions. GARF, f. 7021, op. 116, d. 178, ll. 1–3. 165. Sudebnyi protsess po delu o zlodeianiiakh nemetsko-fashistskikh zakhvatchikov na territorii Latviiskoi, Litovskoi i Estonskoi SSR (Riga: Knigoizdatel’stvo, 1946), 106. Nisan Anolik died in the United States in 1974. Grossman and Erenburg, Chernaia kniga, 527n23. 166. Balberyszski, Stronger than Iron, 318–21. 167. I could not trace the later life of Weintraub, but before leaving Klooga he took steps to contact his father-in-law in New York through both the U.S. consul in Moscow and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Hersey, Here to Stay, 178; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Jewish Survivors of Nazi Mass-Murder in Estonia Seek Relatives through JTA,” JTA Daily News Bulletin October 8, 1944, http://pdfs.jta.org/1944/1944-10-08_229.pdf (accessed July 16, 2019). 168. Zvika Dror, ed., Klooga on the North: Testimonies of Survivors of a Concentration Camp in Estonia (Kibutz Dalia: Ma’arechet, 1997), 51, vii. © 2019 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Red Stars and Yellow Stars: The Soviet Investigation of Klooga Concentration Camp
JF - Holocaust and Genocide Studies
DO - 10.1093/hgs/dcz022
DA - 2019-11-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/red-stars-and-yellow-stars-the-soviet-investigation-of-klooga-3fMN4055NF
SP - 197
VL - 33
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -